Queen's Gambit

by Bradley Harper

  Elizabeth and I sat together on chairs placed outside the room, holding hands as we wept. Sir Edward leaned down to Elizabeth and placed his hand on her shoulder. “Your father died nobly. Never forget that. I, and an entire empire, are in his debt.” Then Bradford turned to me. “The assassin’s nationality puts us in an awkward position. If this gets out, war with Germany is almost certain. Things are heated enough with the Boer situation. I’ll speak to the Home Secretary, but I think we’ll want to keep this quiet. Can I count upon your discretion, Miss Harkness?”

  I released my hold of Elizabeth and stood to be eye-to-eye with the man. I noted his empty left sleeve. No coward, I thought. Now, let’s see if he’s a man of honor.

  I took a deep breath. “May we speak in private?”

  53

  Tuesday, June 22, to Thursday, June 24

  The Ethington apartment

  Sir Edward agreed to all my conditions without hesitation, proving he was indeed as honorable as he was brave. I felt more tired than I had my entire life. Time to discuss the future with Elizabeth and see what else I might lose this day.

  I called her to the kitchen, and we sagged into our chairs to sip tea. I took a deep breath, then sat my cup down and began.

  “Your father’s last wish was for me to look after you but I have no legal standing to do so. However, if you agree to my being your guardian, we’ll need to go to court. Commissioner Bradford has said he’ll speak on my behalf, if you request it.”

  I took both of Elizabeth’s hands in mine. “But if there is a relative, or someone else you’d prefer, I’ll bow out. I am still bound for Australia the seventh of next month, so if you would rather stay here, I’ll do all I can to expedite the process. Once we board the ship, there’s no turning back.”

  Elizabeth sat silent for a moment, then she stood and extended her arms. “There’s nothing for me here, Margaret. Let me be, if not your daughter, at least your friend and companion.”

  I thought about what it would be like to have someone across the table from me every day. To share a joke, or just to sit together in companionable silence. I knew that some handsome young Australian man who knew how to ride would all too soon take her away. Time enough to mourn that day when it comes.

  “Aye,” I answered, hugging her tightly. “For as long as may be.”

  The funeral service was well attended by James’s colleagues in the force, and I sat beside Elizabeth to her left, Police Commissioner Bradford on her right. Senior Inspector Murdock surprised the attendees with his heartfelt eulogy, and more than a few of the stalwart constables and inspectors had need of their handkerchief before he’d finished.

  As we were preparing to leave the gravesite, Sir Edward paid Elizabeth his parting respects and presented her with the senior inspector badge her father would have worn. A fine family heirloom to be sure, but a cold metal shield was a poor substitute for the kind and warm man it was intended for.

  I never inquired as to who had fired the fatal shot into our assassin. Perhaps it was James, perhaps me, perhaps both. I understood why military firing squads had some rifles loaded with blank shots, so that the members of the firing party could find solace in their ignorance.

  In much the same way I often wondered how things might have been different if I’d asked James to join me in Australia. Perhaps it was better not to know. The dreams we cling to in the dark often provide greater comfort than the truths we must confront at daybreak.

  54

  Wednesday, July 7

  Aboard the HMS Hampton

  When we boarded, the porters were amused that neither Elizabeth nor myself would entrust our hatboxes to them. I’m sure they assumed each contained some frilly woman’s bonnet. They would have been surprised to know that both enclosed a man’s black derby— Elizabeth’s old but well-tended, save for a recently acquired bullet hole, a reminder of times past, and mine which was recently purchased, a reminder of what could have been.

  We were pleased to learn we would share our table for eight with six members of a touring company of actors and musicians who were performing comic operas by Gilbert and Sullivan. Four of our table companions were bit players and understudies, and the other two the pianist and second violin.

  “The director, conductor, and principal actors travel first-class,” explained Mister Woolsey, the second violinist and music librarian, “as well as our young violin prodigy, Albert. The majority of our musicians we hire from the local area to reduce our traveling expenses. Employing local musicians also ensures that several of their friends and family will attend, so we usually make a profit from their hire.”

  He shrugged. “But a stodgy old war horse like me can’t complain when I get to break bread with charming ladies like yourselves.”

  I looked up from my soup and put my spoon down. “Tell me, Mister Woolsey, will you be performing during our journey?”

  “Of course, Madam. We must practice, and there’s no better rehearsal than before an audience. Is there a particular piece you’d like to hear?”

  I looked across the table at Margaret chatting with a young actor and recalled my words to her that one’s enemies could be your best teachers. Mine had taught me the value of friendship. I returned my gaze to the musician.

  “Schubert’s Serenade has recently become one of my favorites.”

  I could tell the old musician approved. “A beautiful piece, and a challenging one. I could speak with Albert to arrange a performance for you if you’d like.”

  I shook my head. “I’d much prefer you play it for me if you would. I was told by someone dear to me that only a mature artist like yourself can properly shape the silence.”

  EPILOGUE

  Saturday, July 10

  Herr Grüber was in a foul mood when he boarded the overnight ferry from Stone Haven to Rotterdam and took scant notice of the two Italian gentlemen with a large steamer trunk in the adjacent cabin. The next morning as the steward made his rounds with hot tea, he noted Grüber’s cabin was empty and suitcase gone, well before the ship entered harbor. As he surveyed the disarray of the bedding, he surmised the passenger hadn’t slept very well. In that he was correct; Grüber had not slept at all.

  AFTERWORD

  This book is a work of fiction, though it was closely modeled on real events and people. Following, I list the various true personages in my story, and some of the facts I used to flesh out their character, as well as a few other odds and ends. I am a history geek, so I hope you find these details as interesting as I do.

  PEOPLE

  Archduke Franz Ferdinand

  Fourteen years after Queen Victoria’s death, her grandson would wage war with England, one caused by the assassination of the queen’s tablemate the night prior to her royal procession. The portly Archduke Franz Ferdinand was felled by Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Black Hand, a secret Serbian military society dedicated to the unification of the Slavic people under one throne. He was not an anarchist, as several history books have erroneously reported.

  As predicted by Herr Grüber, the war which followed brought the end of ruling aristocracies in Europe.

  Queen Victoria

  Queen Victoria insisted that no ruling heads of state be invited to her Diamond Jubilee celebration because she didn’t want to bother with protocol, nor with having to house them during their visit. (Lesser nobility were allowed.) From 1861 until her death in 1901, in mourning for Prince Albert, she wore only black and she refused to wear a crown or carry her scepter during the royal procession. Her one concession to her status was having gems sewn around the brim of her bonnet, and this became quite the fashion for a short time afterward.

  In real life, she survived eight assassination attempts by seven would-be assassins. John Francis tried to kill her on two successive days (May 29 and 30, 1842) while she rode in her carriage through a park. The Queen refused to alter her route the second day despite the danger, though she forbade her ladies-in-waiting to accompany her. The assassin’s pistol mi
sfired on the first attempt, but on day two it functioned flawlessly. Fortunately, Prince Albert pulled his wife down just as the bullet flew over her head. The Queen’s concern for the safety of others while disdaining the risk to herself inspired the scene when she has her ladies-in-waiting shift to their right, out of the assassin’s line of fire, leaving her fully exposed.

  A video segment of the Diamond Jubilee’s procession can be found on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnip7RRc3Q4). Between the timestamps of 1:38 and 1:50, the Queen is shown briefly in the carriage drawn by six cream-colored horses: She is the small dark figure in the carriage that appears for perhaps three seconds. At approximately four feet ten inches, this diminutive woman was empress to the largest realm ever known.

  Police Commissioner

  Sir Edward Bradford

  Sir Edward Bradford spent the majority of his military career in India, where he lost his left arm to a tigress, greatly impressing Indian royalty. He was appointed police commissioner after his tour of duty as Queen Victoria’s aide-de-camp and served in that capacity from 1890 to 1903. He was responsible for the preservation of law and order in a city with over six million inhabitants, utilizing a force of only fourteen thousand men. He was active and well-respected by the men of his force. He insisted all stations be linked by telegraph, greatly enhancing the communications within the force, though in later years he refused to install telephones, preferring the brevity that telegraphs required.

  His record of accomplishment as police commissioner is remarkable. When he assumed command, the Metropolitan Police were held in poor regard for their beatings of protestors during a public demonstration in 1887, and the police were actively striking. He settled the strike, established more stations, bettered the conditions in the older ones, established a summer uniform and insisted shifts be varied to prevent boredom. Easygoing by nature, at one time or another he visited every station, talked with the officers, and listened. In 1899 London recorded its lowest crime rate in the city’s history, and the force was respected by all law-abiding citizens.

  Luigi Parmeggiani

  Signore Parmeggiani was a man of many talents, few of them legal. He was at one time an ardent anarchist and bomb-maker, but by the time we meet him in the story he had become the manager of two antiquity stores, one in Paris and the other in London. He often went by the name of Louis Macy. He founded the “Macy Collection,” a line of minor art objects which wound up in private collections and smaller museums. Most of them turned out to be fakes.

  Peter Kropotkin

  Descendent of royalty (the Rurik Dynasty), as a young man he led geographic expeditions into Siberia and the Arctic, but his political activities led to his imprisonment in Russia. He escaped to Western Europe and lived in England, Switzerland, and France before returning shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution to Russia, where he died four years later.

  Herman Ott/Viktor Zhelyabov

  Andrei Zhelyabov, the lover of Sofia, was a leader of the anarchist group which successfully assassinated Tsar Alexander II on their third attempt. Sofia Perovskaya was also a real person and served as lookout for the assassination. She was reunited with her lover Andrei in prison after the assassination and they were hanged together shortly afterward. His younger brother, Viktor/Herman, is a fictional character.

  Professor Joseph Bell

  Fourth generation of a line of surgeons in Edinburgh, Bell was renowned both for his clinical skills (he was the Surgeon in Attendance to Her Majesty when she was in Scotland), and his keen powers of observation. He assisted the police in various cases. The two best known are the Jack the Ripper murders, in which he analyzed the handwriting of the notes signed Jack the Ripper, and the Monson murder case in Argyle, Scotland, this being the case that Oberst Adler mentions when first meeting Bell in my story.

  Bell was Arthur Conan Doyle’s professor of surgery while Doyle was a student in Edinburgh, and Doyle served briefly as his clerk of the surgery service. Years later Doyle would recall Bell’s keen powers of observation and create the most famous fictional detective of all time, Sherlock Holmes.

  Margaret Harkness

  The image to the right is the only portrait of Margaret I could find. Despite spending some time in the company of George Bernard Shaw, an avid cameraman, no photograph of her is known to exist, which I believe only adds to her mystique.

  I do not know if she was in the habit of wearing men’s clothing or carrying a derringer, but everything else I have written in the book regarding her literary career and biography is accurate, except that in 1897 she was already residing in Australia.

  Those interested in knowing more about Margaret can reference the excellent article about her on the Victorian Web (http://victorianweb.org/gender/harkness.html), a website for researchers into that era.

  The Harkives is a fabulous website devoted entirely to Margaret’s life and works (https://theharkives.wordpress.com).

  ODDS AND ENDS

  The Girandoni Air Rifle

  I am indebted to Dr. Beeman and his excellent website (http://www.beemans.net/Austrian%20airguns.htm).

  The air rifle I use in the story is closely modeled on one used by the Austrian army in the late eighteenth century. Capable of firing large-caliber lead balls at the astounding rate of one shot per second from a magazine holding up to twenty balls, it was greatly feared, and any soldier captured with one in their possession was executed on the spot as a sniper.

  In my story, I make the butt-stock/air reservoir more fragile than it was in real life, though it wasn’t as sturdy as a conventional firearm. Its principal weakness was the difficulty in pressurizing the flasks up to 800 psi, and the hand pump issued with it required over one thousand strokes. Typically, a sniper would be issued three flasks and they would be repressurized in the rear lines by a large rotating pump.

  A Girandoni rifle, or one very similar to it, was carried by the Lewis and Clarke expedition but was used mainly for demonstrations to intimidate the tribes they encountered.

  There’s an excellent YouTube video demonstrating the operation and the actual sound of one firing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPjJlJcznzw).

  St. Paul’s Boys Choir Boarding School

  I am indebted also to the staff of the Youth Hostel Association (YHA) London St.

  Paul’s Youth Hostel (https://www.hihos-tels.com/hostels/yha-london-st-pauls).

  The picture to the right was taken by my daring wife, Chere, from the (second floor European, third floor American), window of the old boarding school for the boys’ choir as she lay on the top bunk. As you can see, it is on a side street ending at the plaza outside the cathedral. Together we measured eighty-eight paces from the inscription marking where the royal carriage sat to the wall directly beneath this window, well within the range of the model air rifle Herman carries in my story.

  The Kruger Telegram

  The Kruger Telegram was sent by Kaiser Wilhelm II to president Kruger of the Transvaal Republic, on January 3, 1896, congratulating the president on repelling the Jameson Raid, a sortie by six hundred British irregulars from Cape Colony into the Transvaal. The raid was a disaster for the British with sixty-five raiders killed to only one Boer, the rest surrendering. The telegram caused great indignation in Great Britain as it was taken as an endorsement by the Kaiser of the Transvaal’s independence in what was seen by the British as their sphere of influence.

  People in England were so angry that the windows of German shops were broken, and German sailors were attacked on the streets of London. A chastened Kaiser wrote a letter of apology to his grandmother and the anger died down somewhat, but was still a sore spot at the time of the Diamond Jubilee.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to the head concierge of the Hotel Rome in Berlin, for sharing with me the hotel’s legend that it once provided the Kaiser with a bathtub on a weekly basis while the palace was undergoing renovation.

  The tarot card sequence was due to the kindness of Sorin Lucien. He is
a regular instructor in the practice, and I gave him a short biography of Margaret and asked him to construct a reading that would be sufficiently in tune with her later life. I was thrilled with the result.

  I would like to thank my various beta readers who helped this aging man write from a woman’s perspective. Any failings in that endeavor are entirely my own. Susan Putnam, Eleanore Brennan, Karen Chase, Vivian Makosky, Ted Petrocci, Milyn King, my agent, Jill Marr, and my freelance editors who helped make the manuscript a coherent document, Lourdes Venard, Derek McFadden, and Petra Winters. I was thrilled to work on the final version with Dan Mayer of Seventh Street Books, who was also my line editor for my first novel. Working with him is a joy and a true collaboration. I am especially grateful to my friend and mentor, John DeDakis, who read an early draft written entirely in third person, and it was he who suggested I write Margaret’s parts in her own voice. My wife, Chere, was both beta reader and editor of last resort, as her eyes always make the final pass, before I hit “send.”

  The map of the cathedral and boarding school was created by Stephanie Caruso of Paste Creative, my social media assistant and all-around cyber-elf.

  A special shout-out to Christopher Spencer. Christian was only seventeen years old when he read this and was helpful in giving me a young person’s perspective. I am a professional Santa Claus and he was my elf in 2018 when we worked a Christmas party for children with cancer and their families. Later he told me how much that affected him, then told me wanted to do it again, next year. He reassures me that the world will be fine in his generation’s hands.